Video: 1969–The Death of Modernism

In 1973, Patrick Moynihan said, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.”

The 1960s began with a presidential election between conservative cold warrior Richard Nixon…and the surprisingly conservative cold warrior John F. Kennedy. In terms of the similarity between the two candidates, and the public they represented, this was a high point in national unity.

The assassination of JFK began a process that ultimately shattered that unity. During the course of the 1960s, Americans witnessed the split between the liberalism of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ, and the rise of the punitive New Left that emerged in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination.

As we explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, the alpha and the omega of those two forms of American liberalism came less than a month apart, in the summer of 1969: